I just realized that when I was in nyc last week I ONLY saw queer friends. The. entire. time.

I suppose the exception could be the friend that I stayed with, who is now dating a man, however since she is my ex-fiancee I think she still counts. She amassed quite a few toasters after we broke up too.

But seriously – I may have even made up for the lack of queer buddies out here in LA for a considerable time. I saw seven queer friends and a play with Alan Cumming (king of the pretty queers, imho), drank too much at a lady bar, and I auditioned to puppet a giant fake animal.

Possibly the gayest trip ever, at least for a trip that didn’t involve anything tropical or a white party.

Twice in the past week I’ve had friends say this to me – “it’s so funny that you think you’re butch”. This comment is right up there with the standard exclamation “but you’re so pretty!” when I talk about what being butch means to me. Both make me roll my eyes. Both take me down a rung on the ladder of self-worth. Both are said with best intentions.

In this instance, my friends who think it’s “funny” are women of a certain age – over 45-50 – so I can imagine that being butch may come from a different era for them. I don’t know a lot about lgbt history, or even the feminist movement, but I know that back in the seventies the lesbian separatist movement cordoned off the butches into their own category and marched along without them. I posit that these friends of mine, being fairly feminist themselves, might still harbor the antiquated guidelines (and internal prejudices) borne from that decade. Because clearly they don’t realize that by telling me they think the words I find powerful to identify myself are “funny,” they force me back into a box of their own design, and injure my self-confidence with their thoughtlessness. Not that either of these women intended to hurt me – but the double-standard never ceases to amaze.